Development of Automation To Assist Declassification

The Department of Energy, in response to the Secretary's Openness
Initiative, is seeking ways to reduce the volume of classified
information, while at the same time, protecting that information which
would be of advantage to would-be proliferants, terrorists, and
potential adversaries. An essential element of this process is to use
technology to speed up the document review process without degrading the
quality of the review. The Department is seeking possible Cooperative
Research and Development Agreement partners to develop and commercialize
this technology.

The Department of Energy has initiated a program to develop an
intelligent computer system capable of indicating, with a high level of
confidence, that a particular portion of text may contain classified
information and the remainder may be declassified. To that end, several
areas are currently under study:

A system that can accurately scan paper documents, even those of poor
quality, and store them as visual images and convert the text portion of
those images to computer-readable text files.

Representation of declassification knowledge in computers so that the
computer can use that knowledge to review documents.

Computer systems that can automatically "learn" and update their
declassification knowledge.

Computer software that can "understand" natural language text to the
degree necessary to apply declassification knowledge and recognize
classified documents.

A system that can recognize nontext portions of document and compare
them to identify identical patterns.

If a successful system can be developed, it has significance to the
Department of Energy and to American competiveness.

An intelligent computer declassification system has the potential to
help reduce the requirement for two classification experts to review
each document when conducting large systematic reviews. In the long
term, a computerized tool may be developed to perform some types of
declassification review.

This development is intended to speed up the process by which
information that is no longer classified can be readily made available
to the public.

In addition, the technology from this development would have
applications at other agencies, as well as commercial applications. For
this reason, the Department of Energy is seeking cost sharing
Cooperative Research and Development Agreement partners.

Environmental, Safety and Health Organizations. These stakeholders
will benefit from the greater volume and faster availability of
requested research information.

The Public. Concerned citizens will have quicker access to desired
information.

Department of Energy and the U.S. Government. The Department of
Energy will improve its current image of secrecy and poor
responsiveness. Response time for information requests will be reduced.
Both the Department of Energy and the Government, in general, will
benefit from the example of openness in Government.

A. At the present we are evaluating expertise and existing work in our
national laboratories, and the state of the art in corporate and
academic circles, and plans to issue a Critical Program Review report in
December 1994. This report will indicate if the program's objectives
are feasible, and how we should proceed. As work on the program goes
forward, critical reviews will be held about every year to assess
program progress and direction.

Q. What is the project's schedule for development?

A. A critical design review is targeted for completion in December 1994
to assess progress. A research and development schedule will be part of
that document.

Q. What is meant by, "understand natural language text?"

A. The ability of the system to understand text in the Department of
Energy documents to the degree necessary to identify when they convey
classified information.

Q. How will this system work?

A. We are only at the beginning of this project and cannot say whether
it will actually work or not. Our vision is that the hard copy files
containing classified information would be converted to computer
readable files. Those files would processed by the system, with
appropriate software (not yet developed) separating files which are most
likely to contain unclassified information. If a human reviewer
concurs, those unclassified documents could then be approved for
release. Our vision continues in that the system would then identify
the classified information in the documents with a high degree of
accuracy and in conjunction with a human classification expert, permit
the rapid declassification of the content of the document itself, or
accurate and fast delineation of the classified portions. Again, this
is not a description of what exists today. It is hoped for benefits of
a program based in part upon a Cooperative Research Development
Agreement that hopes to push the state of the art to ultimately benefit
the stakeholders in terms of more rapid, more accurate and less costly
reviews of documents prior to their release.

Q. This seems like a very difficult system to build. Do you really
think this is possible?

A. It is a very difficult objective. However, the manual way we are
declassifying documents is time consuming and expensive. The Department
wants to do everything possible to speed up this process. This program
is high risk, but its potential benefits are tremendous. In addition,
it is anticipated that a series of spinoffs from this effort will
significantly increase the speed with which documents are reviewed prior
to development of the full system.

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